Rethinking Beliefs, Thoughts, and Actions

This could also be titled: "Guilt and Shame," but I'm trying to escape the dichotomy between those two and get to a more accurate discussion of what people mean when they say that either guilt or shame is bad, or analyze whether a culture is shame or guilt based.

There seems to be a pendulum swing with guilt and shame. Every few generations, one or the other is declared to be "bad" while the other is declared to be "good" and everyone is encouraged to try to change their language while the underlying architecture of human interaction is left unchanged. It's like the shifts in taboo language - so long as the underlying interactions are harmful to the participants, new words will pop up to take advantage of the underlying assumptions and prejudices of the people involved.

I believe the struggle with language about guilt and shame is that we 1) need a means to police and control human behavior and 2) people police and control human behavior both in ways which try to minimize harm and in ways which try to inflict harm. Harm here is being defined as anything which injures a person, physically or emotionally, and denies their basic importance as a unique person (This is a working definition, so expect to see modifications in the future). Axiomic to this discussion is that harm is "bad" and minimizing harm is "good".

Analyzing this system is made more difficult with language because language is designed to minimize or disguise our mistaken desire for inflicting harm within the language of minimizing harm. We often even think in terms of this language - the entire idea of "tough love" or "let that be a lesson to you" is about how the harmed person deserves the harm due to their own actions, and if they only changed their actions then they would not deserve harm and thus would not be harmed. I believe the basis of victim blaming is here, in our internalization of shame/guilt and the magical thinking inherent in the belief that we have a 100% causal relationship to everything in our lives and nothing is correlational (at a later point I want to tackle the problems with "The Secret" and other "you create your universe" POVs, but not today; for the moment, please accept as axiomic that we do not cause every event in our lives). The substitution of minimizing harm language in inflicting harm circumstances is also in a response to our views of ourselves as people who do not actually want to harm others (we'll leave the people who want to harm others out for the moment, if you don't mind).

Most people have a set of half-conscious characteristics of "proper behavior" (often with sub-categories based on race, gender, socio-economic level, degree of able bodied and mind-ness, etc...) which are an amalgam of what they were taught and what they observed throughout their life. Keep in mind, there's fairly solid evidence that children learn much more from observation and interaction than from explicit and conscious teaching; this is how unconscious biases transmit themselves through the generations - a powerful positive feature of our psyches with some negative side effects which do not respond to conscious, reasoned argument. 

Instead, from a young age, parents use guilt/shame to control their children and socialize them.

It begins, often, with physical violence. The use of spanking, slapping, the belt, the paddle, etc... to discipline a child has an emotional component as well in communicating that someone is a "bad person" and "should be punished". I remember a conversation with a co-worker once where she failed a math test and her father took his belt to her. She explained very urgently that she had to have the secondary physical punishment (in addition to the social punishment of a bad grade) in order to "teach her a lesson" (paraphrased), and she valued much lower in her memory the actual teaching her grandmother did to show her how to do the math she clearly didn't understand.

That is - the actual cure for the failure/ignorance was valued less in her memory that punishment for having failed, and she believed the latter demanded the presence of the former despite them coming from completely different sources, and despite saying to me that she thought she would have paid attention when her grandmother taught her without being beaten. Indeed, that question (about whether she could have learned form her grandmother without being beaten for failure by her father) ended our conversation, as she suddenly became very upset and changed the subject.

What I'm trying to point at here is that our defense of guilt/shame being used against us (and by definition everyone) is a very basic aspect of most of our minds - including mine. It is pre-verbal and tied into our primary relationships with our caregivers (caregivers here is much broader than most people seem to use it - I actually would include my friend's father and grandmother under the category caregivers even though her mother was in the picture as well, and even though her father was violent and not "care-giving". One could argue his version of care was violence - and I think this is an important part of my point, that caregiving can include violence and neglect). For whatever reason, children seem particularly susceptible to the perception that they directly cause all aspects of their lives; this includes within it a need to reform punishments and harm to the child as being caused by the child - as in the prior example, my friend needed to be beaten because she was beaten, so therefore she must have needed to be beaten. The logic is circular, and thus carries both the illusion of reasonableness (that is: it seems as if it has been reasoned into despite actually being axiomic) and a resistance to being reasoned out of. My friend's response to even the gentlest questioning that she needed to be beaten with extreme anxiety and a topic change, which clearly indicates to me how powerful it is within out minds (yes, I'm generalizing from a single example - but I am trying to use this in more of a parable sense than a data sense; that is, I'm counting on you, the reader, being able to apply a similar situation to yourself in your defensiveness about how your parents raised you, whether it involved beatings or not).

Hopefully this has established not only that our early experiences of caregiving have a powerful effect on our minds, but also that these points of view have not been reasoned into but often carry the patina of reasonableness and "common sense". I also want to put up a reminder that the language around inflicting harm versus minimizing harm is muddled due to how often language of the latter is used to cover up the former. Next post I want to get into the positive roll guilt/shame plays in terms of community building and ethical individualization.

TED

I have become a huge fan of TED - Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It's a series of lectures and talks on topics of interest to people, usually liberal and often odd.

Here are some of my favorites.

Erinaceously delicious about the dictionary and how a lexicographer views language.

On Being Wrong about how we behave and feel when we're making mistakes.

What Adults can Learn from Kids which is a really entertaining talk about age discrimination.

On Vulnerability about the thing which brings the most incandescent joy is being open to and vulnerable for pain.

Clocking the Fastest Animals abot... just what it sonds like. Fast animals.

How Bacteria Communicate on a way for group communication without leaders.

A search for dark energy, which is a fascinating look at dark energy and dark matter.

The Talk is about... jsut what it sounds like - introducing a child to the idea of sex through frogs.

Social Media and the End of Gender about how interests are beginning to be central to identity instead of gender and age.

Transplant Cells instead of Organs about the possibility of transplanting cells for organs instead of whole organs, which would open wide doors for multiple transplants and change the face of health in the world.

The Rise of Personal Robots about the possibilities for robots which respond to human social cues

On being a woman about changes of women in politics

Gift of Play from Bonobo Apes about the sexually active, friendly, loving culture of bonobos.

The Birth of a Word is about complex datamining efforts which can connect together social interactions with discrete items, like a media source or a word.

Cycles of Uncertainty

I wake up in a soft bed to the sound of the radio. My cat is curled up next to me, miowing every time I move to hit the snooze button – resettling when I lie back and tuck the covers more closely around me. My arm is cold, curled above the covers around him, feeling his soft fur against my skin.

In the car, I fret about filling my gas tank before the day starts too far. I put five dollars in yesterday, but it needs to be completely filled – I have at least sixty miles to drive today, only half of them covered by mileage.

Sonali Kohakar is on the radio, her words not penetrating my fogged brain as I drive to the first stop, but I know her voice as she signs off for the morning. I feel vaguely guilty – I never manage to get up in the morning to listen to her show unless I have to, and I always forget to listen to the podcast in the evening.

I wake up my first client of the day, rush through reminders, chant ‘gas gas gas’ in my mind so I don’t miss my stop. The gas station, thirteen cents cheaper than the one katty corner to it, is a game of tetris with cars. I wave to the attendants I know; I’m there so often.

The radio is covering the demonstrations in Cairo, Egypt. There’s a young woman, she sounds younger than me – her voice clear and sweet and full of laughter despite her situation. “I’m staying until it’s done,” she says. “I don’t think there’s anything for me if Mubarak stays in power. They recorded me saying, ‘Down with Mubarak’.”

I wonder what it would take for me to be recorded saying, “Down with…” anyone. Would I do it if I knew I could be killed for it? My own cowardice is bitter.

Things don’t go well at my second stop, and I wonder how much of it is me, tight and guilty and stressed. What do I bring in to cause failure? How can I ultimately tell; the variables are so numerous that any sort of sensible analysis seems hopeless. I’m caught up again in a cycle of thoughts which have been increasingly bothering me – how much of my analysis of what “should” be worked on, be the focus, valid? Obviously, keeping basics like food and shelter, but there’s pressure for more, to shape people into “citizens” in some way which has an army of unspoken assumptions about what a person should be.

How can I serve my clients and be an agent for the state?

Supposed supporters of Mumbarak are now approaching the demonstrations – demonstrations which are being described as peaceful, clean, celebratory. Violence is breaking out, they say. I know elsewhere, on other radio stations, the language will be of violence “breaking out” in the “riot” in Cairo. I believe what I listen to, others believe what they listen to – and I wonder how we can determine the veracity of our sources of information. I’m biased toward the underdog, the citizens, the people who just want a peaceful world without fear; language about them will always draw my sympathy.

I stop at Starbucks, which has signs on the wall advertizing their word for a better world. To illustrate this, brown people work on coffee plantations in de-saturated photographs. What would it be like if those people were white?

Out better world, built by the labor of the brown.

My favorite discussion board has gotten into get another debate about Palestine and Israel, one without many insults. I feel ignorant, despite hearing about the issue a lot, it seems too often be talked about vaguely, idealistically, politically, with the moments of specific events standing out starkly – the image of three teenage girls dead, and one blinded in one eye. A doctor frantically trying to get help for children bombed in his very own home, calling a friend on television. This doctor preaches peace now, when he speaks, even after the death of so many dear to him. His preaching seems to fall far short of those who could bring about peace.

I wonder what would take me out on the streets.

I had once said something like the Japanese interment camps might have, but looking at the detention of undocumented people … I’m not so sure. It didn’t take me onto the streets, after all.

Would I have hidden Jews in my home in Germany?

I return to the radio with my drink, driving and listening as the radio followed the lead of the blog I read, to Palestine and Israel. In my mind the two conversations are confused, tangled up like a hairball. I’m not sure what I think anymore, except I’m tired of people getting hurt and dying. I’m tired of suffering.

How much do I contribute to that suffering, unseen to me?

Another client, trying to make peace in a smaller place – and another thread of thought intrudes; how do we deal peacefully with aggression? How can aggression be contained without either matching aggression or concession?

What role does being “weak” play into it?

I remember a conference I was at, years ago. People began to speak of their Utopias – no cars, no Starbucks, everyone wearing sandals and walking to a spiritual center. What about the people who need cars, who can’t walk down paths, who don’t want to be spiritual, I wanted to rail at them. Who are the people your Utopia excludes without you seeing?

Who are the people my Utopia excludes without me seeing?

When I wish for peace, for an end to violence and suffering, what is the cost there? Who has to pay it?

I imagine myself there, in Cairo, linking arm and arm with others to protect a library, to protect a square, from “thugs” and “pro-Mumbarak” forces.

But I’m not there. I’m here with my Starbucks and my clients.

I could leave, abandon my things and everything comfortable, use my last paycheck to fly to Cairo and link arms. Maybe.

Who would take my clients shopping? Who would listen to them?

Do I listen to them?

Black Faces, White Masks

I finished my thesis (maybe I'll upload bits of it and see if it stands up to the internet as well as it did my advisor) and am finally now, months later, getting to all of the books I picked up for it which I didn't read in time to include.

I'm reading in bits and pieces, though. I don't know if that is sensible or not. Somehow the books on racism are harder to swallow than books that are more white. Yay privilege? I find myself thinking more, reacting more, twitching more in response to books where I'm not the audience. Feature, not a bug, but a sometimes difficult feature to swallow.

Some of it's the denseness, too. I'm finding Molefi Kete Asante book on Afrocentricity as dense as Socrates (though not Aristotle, who still gives me fits - is it weird that my denseness sense is based on dead white guys?) but in a different way, which means all the skills I've developed to read Socrates helps me not at all with Asante. In contrast, Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon has much more straightforward language, but I'm struggling with the androcentric quality of it. In particular, he has one chapter on "The Black Woman and the White Man" which more read like "This is why black women suck for not wanting to marry black men" so I'm snarling quietly at the "The Black Man and the White Woman" which reads more (so far) as an apology for why wanting to be white is seeking purity and culture (the same assumption held in the prior chapter, but was cast as quite negative, while in this chapter the experience of wanting to be the superior is treated more sympathetically).

I can't tell if I'm rougher on it since there's racial things I'm struggling to reconcile my white ass with, or if the gender stuff is problematic enough to get my panties in a bunch about. Probably little of one hand, little of the other.

I'm almost completely cut off from the blog-o-sphere by now. Occasionally I'll catch up on a blog here or there, but I've not read regularly for ages. I'm hung up a bit on public radio now, but lately I've felt overwhelmed by the giganticness of "the world sucks" and the littleness of "I can do something about it". I spend a lot of time making my avatar in Second Life look pretty, and roleplaying, and occasionally snarling about white girls playing black characters who state in character that they find braids exotic.

Exotic, I tell you.

And if I hear one more person wax rhapsodic about how we're in a post racial society, I think I might lose my temper. No, ladies and gentlemen, a black president in the US does NOT make us post-bloody-racial!

On a side note, W. Kamau Bell is AWESOME (check him out, seriously, he is hysterical) and Dr. Who remains awesome despite portraying the Universe as Fsking white (oldschool Dr. Who - Dr. #4 - not the new stuff I've not been keeping up with).

Strange Fruit

Billie Holiday singing.

The phrase 'strange fruit' keeps echoing in my head. Somewhere there is a poem, about the 'strange fruit' now rotting behind bars and growing in prison yards. I can't find it, yet. It taunts me.

More and more I am beginning to understand the rage at blithe racism. At least with 'strange fruit' you wouldn't get your hopes up. Now, with prison owners feeding off the blood of thousands of young men (and an increasing crop of young women), the 'strange fruit' have moved literally and figuratively underground.

Unthinking Eurocentrism is an excellent book, but not an easy read.

I need to go through at some point and see all the movies it references. The ones not aimed at whites interest me the most, to be honest. I'd like to see a world without 'me' in it. Perhaps there I can find a new 'me'.

The Police and Trans Women of Color

Lisa, of Questioning Transphobia (an excellent site everyone should read regularly) writes about the latest expression of privilege on the "colorblind" internets: White Cis Gay Men who use threats of the police against Trans Women of Color who express anger.

Later, apparently on Twitter (now make an ass of yourself 100 times faster!) a comment was made comparing Lyssa's angry words, since appologized for, to the shootings at Virginia Tech. Understandably, this was a little (for little read A WHOLE LOT) upsetting for people who were there.

I'd say, 'check your privilege,' but I don't think they'd listen.

A Few Hours: Feminism is in Choices

Through various events, mostly my fault, I was in imminent threat of losing my electricity if I didn't pay in person at one of the many centeres which accepted those payments. Like any good, middle class, privileged white person, I googled the locations and identified one that was near my home. I didn't really know the area, so I and my map and my car drove there and parked on the street after only getting lost eight or nine times.

As I get out of the car, I'm preoccupied by wondering if I'll be able to pay the bill without actually having the bill because I forgot to grab it that morning. it's with only part of my attention that I notice the clumps of people along the street. Male people, in groups, with what I saw as cold, unfriendly eyes. Male, Latino people.

I feel my body tighten and my face take on the expressionless mask of "I'm above this all" which is my fear response. Behind he mask, my mind is moving at a thousand miles a moment. I know I'm on a street in broad daylight. I know cross-race violence is more unusual, that I'd be more at risk in a group of white men. I try to convince my liberal, leftist mind that it's not really race, it's gender, which somehow seems more justifiable. I walk diagonally across the parkinglot, not willing to let my fear force me into a longer route, and step in between the unmoving group of men. My heart is echoing in my ears.

I saw the store form the street, but I can't find it now. I walk a block down, past more clumps of Latino men, feeling my back knot up and feeling increasingly unsafe and vulnerable. I just recovered from a back injury; any sharp, physical movements are likely to render me unable to move from the pain. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch the Latino men watch me. I can't deny anymore that as much as it is gender based fear, ti is also racial, and I feel shame. I'm a disgrace to progressives everywhere, and yet I still feel fear - fear that I know is irrational and prejudiced.

I turn back, moving further toward the road to see the signs of the stores. My desination is in the back of a barber shop. A young girl, also Latina, is hanging around the door, and I feel the mask crack as she catches my eye and I smile at her. She smiles back. I walk past, into a room filled with Latino men, who watch me with what I perceive to be hostile eyes. I walk to the back, caught between not wanting ot meet eyes of anyone as a form of self-protection and knowing I need to catch somoene's eye to try to pay this damn electric bill. I'm beginning to wish I was anywhere else but here, and consider tyring to find another, whiter, area to pay my bill in.

I need to come back with the actual bill.

I begin to make my stiff-backed, hard-faced way back to my car, shame and fear both swirling inside of me.

And I'm angry, now. Angry at myself, and at the world, and at my own cowardice. My own fear which keeps me from treating these clumps of men as people, not as threats. Angry at my impulse to find another, more white, place to do something basic.

And I think about my role in the drama, the single, well dressed, white woman invading a Latin@ neighborhood with her stiff, proud face. And i try to put myself in their place, watching this obvious outsider invade out of necessity.

I drive home, thinking. I get my bill, thinking. I refuse to find another spot; cowardice and racism will not win. I drive back to the same place an dpark around the corner.

A pair of latina women are speaking to each other. I see them glance at me, see a hardness, feel my own mask and fear and shame rise, then remind myself - here I am the interloper. Here I am the outsider. I feel my face soften a little.

I walk back to the store. I feel the fear rise again, and I remind myself of the reality - I have the privilege here. I am of the dominant culture. I cannot know what they are thinking, but I should not assume the worst.

The group of Latino men are still on the corner, but somehow they look different to me now. I can't quantify it, but my fear is less. I smile again at the girl; she has two brothers with her now. They are acting as children do, all boredom and energy.

I walk through the barber shop. I pay my bill. My cashier communicates with me in gestures. I smile and try to speak clearly as well as use gestures to communicate. I pay my bill.

I leave the store, still an outsider, still privileged, now awareness of my own internalized, insidious, and horrible racism.

Humorless

One of the long time accusations toward feminists, at least white ones, were that we are humorless. Even a comedian I love a great deal, George Carlin, made a joke along this line - I believe the 'joke' was, 'Imagine Elmer Fudd Raping Porky Pig.'

Two things make that joke more funny than other rape humor, which is to say not much. One, the figures are not only fictional but cartoons. Two is that it is rape of a man by another man, which carries an additional "they deserve" it weight than even rape of a woman by a man.

"You deserved it" is the implicit threat of rape. Usually the "deserved it" is justified by a presumed poor decision on the part of the rape victim/survivor. Just about anything is a poor decision by this rubric: wearing too much clothing or too little; going out or living along; letting a male friend sleep over; being someplace in public; having male friends; touching male friends. You'll note the entire previous list presumes the victim/survivor is female, implicitly if nor explicitly. That is largely because, for all intents and purposes, only one form of male on male rape is acknowledged - prison rape - and there the "you deserved it" is being a criminal. Or, rather, being prosecuted by a court of law, which is not necessarily the same as being a criminal. Male on male rape outside of prison is barely ever mentioned, and female on male rape is considered a joke by a distressingly large number of people.

I'm not touching racial or sexual orientation issues very much; a lot of this is because I'm not sure of them, but I will note in passing that there is history of accusations of rape being used as a "you deserved it" for murdering black men, which is unacceptable, and that men of color are disproportionately sentenced to more and longer terms in prison, which opens them up for a higher likelihood of rape. I'm sure there are many more intersections, such as appearance and fat biases, and caregiver rape of their clients which is under-reported and also often used as a punch line.

Recently, someone I find quite funny and appealing and even a bit hott made reference to a longstanding joke about a "rape van" with pokemons and lolipops in the glove compartment. It stems off of a recent addiction of mine, Repo: the Genetic Opera (if you like dark, love music, and can handle a bit of gore, this movie may be for you), specifically something said by TZ, one of the two authors and an actor in the movie, about the presumed target audience and their presumed attitude toward women (I htink; I can't find anything on the original instance). I haven't yet decided, outside of this post, how I'm going to address the comment by TZ (if at all), and I didn't have the ovaries to talk to FAH (funny, appealing, hott) person who made the reference, but someone else did and he rapidly dropped it without any sign of defensiveness, which should be normal but is phenomenal.

At least some of my hesitancy was that old insult about humorless feminists. I consider myself rather funny and witty, and I had accepted wholesale that being a humorless feminist was a horrible, awful thing to be, but I've changed my mind.

I'm ok being humorless in some things.

Rape isn't funny.

Jokes about rape carry an implicit "you deserve it" which is unacceptable to anyone, male of female, because at the end of the day the "you" includes all of us.

Shades of Hopelessness

I often don’t know what to say.

Many have spoken in the past about the importance of speaking out, even when you’re unsure; sometimes I think my own fear of speaking out imperfectly – of getting something wrong – is an artifact of my white liberal consciousness, and sometimes I think it’s tiredness after a day of swimming from fractured consciousness to fractured consciousness, and sometimes I think it’s an excuse to do nothing, eat ice cream, and enjoy a life where my neighbors (or people across the planet) aren’t dropping bombs and my apartment is standing, with running water and electricity and internet.

A lot of the time, I’m just not sure.

And perhaps the desire for surety itself is an artifact of other ways of thinking which impedes what’s in my mind, and perhaps the desire for surety is one learned from the histories I’ve read of sure people who could exist with clean consciousnesses.

My consciousness these days seems shaded with smoke and blood. Obscured by suffering that isn’t mine, and often suffering that is at a distance.

There is suffering in Gaza, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the suffering of one place doesn’t make the suffering of the others any less, but it does make it harder to hold in hands I can wash clean at the sink, standing in a living room unmarked by ash and bombs and death.

There is a part of me which wants forgiveness for this laziness; this privilege, but another part which knows the desire for forgiveness is centering myself, centering whiteness and liberality again, in a world that needs a different center.

I am not an organizer, or a letter writer. I’m lucky if I can remember to contact the people I love regularly, or do my dishes, or take care of my cat. These days anything beyond tracking my clients and being with them seems impossibly hard, including writing papers and reading books. There are days I don’t want to get out of bed – it all seems to futile, and I won’t manage anything anyway, so just sleep, just rest, just laze in comfort and forget those who don’t have beds, whose families are torn, whose lives are so far from mine.

Selfish and horrible, right?

Some days, all I have is the hope that if I hold faith that a way out is possible, a shining thread will appear by the Minotaur to show me the way out.

But last time, Theseus left Ariadne abandoned on an island.

The underpinnings of these stories are diseased.

And then I remember shocked comments about “How can people live like that.” They have no choice. If the US were attacked tomorrow, and where I live was pinned in, and I survived, I would try to keep going, too – now because of a “how” but simply because the alternative is even worse.

The US continues to take unilateral action in Pakistan, a sovereign state, in a continuation of policies which began by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, both also sovereign states. The rational is defense of our people.

The underpinnings of these stories are diseased.

I Will Never Be a Radical Woman of Color Feminist

I said this sentence in therapy and she said it would make a good blog title.

It makes a good blog post, too, I think.

I'm not a big fan of essentialism in general. Within my experiences as a white feminist, it is a daily irritant. Discussions on whether Thinking or Feeling as personality traits on the Myers-Briggs personality test turn into claims that there can be psychological essentials because men develop muscle easier (and then presumably are stronger than women, which is why there are no female fire fighters, blacksmiths, and why the military is easier on females). Just to cite a recent example of blinding rage. The continued claim that men and women unfortunately born in non-consistent bodies can never be actual men and women would be another.

However, there are identities to which I will never be privy and for which I can never know what it's like. To an anti-essentialist like myself, this is a bitter pie to dig into. I can feel my lip curling. (Did you know disgust was one of five emotions we think are universal with universal expressions? Now you know.) And sometimes this impossibility means that I cannot adopt identities despite finding them wonderful, interesting, and enviable. A part of my anti-essentialism I must also own to is that, as a white liberal who has grown up I can be anything I want to, this smacks of being told no in a very stern voice, and as a rule I don't like that very much.

But, I will never be a radical woman of color feminist.

I'm still teasing out the differences in my mind. I know there are these two things, one I like and one that I don't, and that there are bits and pieces all over the place with them, but I think it will take me being reconciled to the second (since I don't like it, let's call it the antithesis) until synthesis can arise for me personally.

Or I could read the synthesis on an awesome blog.

The second sounds easier - get to work! ;)

Musing on Collage

I walked away from closing one of my jobs down (which included literally packing everything in boxes) with an armload of National Geographics for collage making - which many (white) collagers probably know is like paper gold.

One of the side effects of my chosen thesis (currently condensed to "an attempt at amplifying the archetypal figures which come from and speak to marginalized populations") is that - as an integral part of its nature - it forces me to examine the images I am choosing to put forward in my collages in a way I never had before, and from this new perspective National Geographic is deeply disturbing.

Most of the people in National Geographic don't look like me, you see. Most of their skin is brown because the skin of most of the people in the world is brown. Even the people who have a similar skin tone to mine wear clothes which do not resemble mine, live lives with few ties to mine, have souls which are not a part of me outside of the more philosophical implications embraced branches of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the White New Age Movements in the US.

I find myself looking at the images which draw me with new eyes. Where lurk the artifacts of psyche which dehumanize these people whose photographs I had never before thought twice about cutting up for my own purposes? Can I find them all, or is this a twisted treasure hunt without either clue or end?

Oy! APA! WTF???

People who thing transgendered people need to be "fixed" are a bad choice on setting the DSM standards for anything.

I'd say more, but my brain hurts.

The obvious victims are men, but women exist unseen and unspoken of

This about the Indian workers who were brought in to Tulsa, Oklahoma to work who were held as ill-treated slaves. The details are even more horrifying that the broad strokes; above and beyond paying them, $2 an hour, they were told to clean toilets, fed half of an egg omelet for breakfast, and the vegetarian Hindus were denied milk, which led to many of them beginning to eat meat to survive. And to top it all off, the owner said he thought he was doing the Indian men a FAVOR because people were starving in India, so you can add blatant racism on the caliber of the rationals about owning black slaves because they're inferior.

A local priest gave up his home for them, and a local lawyer paid out of his own pocket to continue the suit against the company on behalf of the men.

And what struck me, especially in light of the recent discussions about what are feminist issues, is that it's this sort of racist mindset that leads to self-justified ill-treatment of women of color. And even in this specific case, the Indian workers borrowed so much money to come that they took out loans and borrowed from their families - which affects their wives and female children. And the way this fell out, some of the men have brought their women and children to the US.

And, more rootlike, these sorts of injustices are the same as the ones we fight against on behalf of women. As fall-out form this case, there is now a pathway for how to deal with human trafficking of this kind in the US; my understanding is that women tend to be trafficked more than men, so they are likely to gain benefits from this precedent. The racial biases against the workers would affect Indian women, too, in addition to the sexism they're going to face. There are so many ways in which this, while not directly a feminist issue, butts up against and will shift feminist issues.

Uprooting Colorblind Racism

I was raised a colorblind racist.

I say this without any particular shame or anger. Colorblind racism was an honest effort on the part of white liberals who wanted to support people of all skin-tones and histories but who clearly Did Not Get It (tm).

And what they did not get was that racism was systemic, not personal, and that all the "be proud of yourself" messages in the world wouldn't do anything so long as people of color (henceforth PoC*) faced regular objectification and bias due to the color of their skin. All of the "our race is human" does nothing against people who appear Latin@ (whether they are or not) needing to wear their birth certificate as protection against being deported for their skin tone and accent despite their birthplace. None of the "I don't see color" helps the thousands of PoC given less advantageous mortgages despite having the same financial situation as whites who got the good mortgages. The world is made of color, the world sees color, and people of color are regularly and routinely discriminated against in the present, as well as inherently disadvantaged due to hundreds of years of degradation and racism which kept them from the best jobs, education, and homes.

Colorblind racism is the well meaning attempt of privileged people to wite-out history and call us even, who then don't notice the people with most of the advantages are white because there is no color anymore. Colorblind racism is the person who immediately brings up "the race card" as something that should be talked about more, who when challenged to describe examples of this "race card" describe a situation where the person in question very likely was discriminated against because of his race, because bosses 'worse' then him were promoted. Colorblind racism is the systematic listing of examples of times when one was racially enlightened in some way without noticing the myriad examples of privilege which smoothed one's path. Colorblind racism is using "ghetto" instead of "black" and not liking it when the blacks outnumber you, but saying you're not racist.

Colorblind racism makes being named a racist worse than racist acts.

Colorblind racism is gaining merit badges on diversity and sewing them onto a dress inspired by Native Tribes who were destroyed by the country I live in, and not even noticing that it might be wrong to take a phrasebook of Native words to pick an "Indian Name" as a part of the same program.

That is what colorblind racism is. I'm going to indulge in one of the more self-indulgent leavings of my liberalism with some quality navel-gazing in the hopes that it will help others to give up their colorblind racism, or at the very least stop precursing racist statements with, "I'm not racist, but..." This form of navel-gazing can be seen as, and used as, an insulation against actually doing the hard things, but I'm hoping here it will serve as something educational in addition. We all know white people LOVE to be educational. ;)

My road from colorblind racism to what I am now (whatever that is; I don't consider myself an ally yet) began with what seems like a simple act, but which in retrospect seems to be a surprisingly rare one for liberals to mention. I approached black women as my superiors.

The seed for this was set in my teens, when many of my wisest supervisors were black women, and some of my wisest friends were Latinas. In watching white liberals hit the shoals of Angry Black Bitch (my gateway drug to the feminists blog-o-sphere), Angry Black Woman, or Having Read the Fine Print and disintegrate into waves of denial, shame, rage, and suddenly pathetic logic, I think I've found that the pattern in general seems to be that they all approach these women as if they were neophytes to their own life experiences - that is, as if the white liberals were the experts, and the women who lived the lives were ignorant of the deeper implications of their lives.

In contrast, I had developed a pattern with presumed whites which I continued into a non-white context; when you are the visitor, your host is the expert. I may eventually disagree with them, but the assumption is that they are the experts and I am the neophyte, so the cues should be taken from them not from my life experiences up until that point. So I would read articles about dumb white people, or racism, or how bias played out in the media, and my ground floor assumption would be that they were accurate.

It helped, I think, that Angry Black Bitch types exactly as my supervisor and peers had spoken when I was a teenager; I found how she turned a phrase and the language she used to be familiar, and I could hear the voice in my head as an echo of those days where I wasn't once of the group, but I was tolerated and possibly even liked. It also helped that Angry Black Woman uses an intellectual language I was comfortable with, and regularly indulges in one of my favorite pastimes - analysis of media - and that she likes many of the same shows I do. Both of these facts eased me into weighing their other statements, the ones I was not aware of or comfortable with, more heavily than I might have otherwise. Because it's all about me. (Actually, I think that both of them were explicitly not writing for me was a feature, not a bug.)

By the time I hit the wider blog-o-sphere and such challenging and brilliant minds of Sydette on Having Read the Fine Print, Donna on The Silence of Our Friends, Nezua at Unapologetic Mexican and Field at The Field Negro, I was well primed to see things which made me defensive as a necessary suffering for the purpose of being able to hear their voices clearly, instead of through a fog of racist assumptions about them (a topic Nezua covers explicitly and extensively in his La Lente Blanca (The White Lens) Series).**

A lot of my assumptions, both about myself and about the world, had to be rethunk. One of the places where I have felt these shifts the hardest were in the media I preferred to consume. Most, if not all, of my favorite books, tv shows, movies, and music are racially problematic (a euphemism for fucking racist). As someone who develops extreme attachment to these things, and who uses them for self-soothing***, this has been the most life changing aspect of this process so far (like I said, I'm not an ally yet), and the part which provided the largest incentive to embrace my privilege and let all of my new knowledge unexist somehow.

Obviously, I haven't done that, but I couldn't be completely honest if I didn't say the thought crossed my mind more than once, especially at 3am when I couldn't sleep and every book I tried to read screamed 'racism, racism, racism' in my face.

More recently, though, the initial wash of guilt and rage and inarticulate stress, I found my brain doing something new. Reading one of my longtime favorite books, one of the millions set in a future that is implied to be all white despite the minority reality of whites worldwide, I began consciously shifting races for each of the characters. Very few had their skin color actually specified (one reference to guards - one light, one dark - and a mention of alabaster which seemed tied to the skin of one of the main characters), and I found it was surprisingly easy to imagine the calm, career cop Director of the largest, space-floating prison as a calm, unflappable, intuitive, Asian man and the narrow, grieving, top class cop as a wiry black man. The remarkable musician who played a piano in an age when most of the instruments will be unknown to us now, who was psychic, and who skillfully entered the Labyrinth and exited again changed but unscathed, could easily be an Australian Aborigine, and the French-speaking gutter-rat singer in the band could, through the magic of imagination, be Latina.

I ran each character through a kaleidoscope, noting where aspects of their character sparked resonances with my internalized biases about what "each race" was like, and which ran contrary to it, and the why wasn't far behind, and suddenly this story I loved so much for it's representation of mystical symbolism became at once more realistic and more rich - suddenly my favorite book didn't have the whitewash of my own brain.

And in my own writing, I notice the shifts. Even when a series I'm basing my stories off of ignore entire continents of the planet Earth, I can re-introduce them. When creating my own worlds, I can make them complex with racial and societal tensions. When thinking about the psychology I love, I can include a wider range of people - I can stop trying to treat me in all of my individual peculiarity, and try to treat us with the plurality of methods needed to actually meet the needs of a wide variety of people. When meeting people, I can try to understand their racial and cultural backgrounds as a part of getting to know them instead of ignoring it as a distraction.

And I find myself increasingly impatient with people who say, "I'm not racist, but..." or who bring up 'reverse racism' as a serious problem that not enough people talk about as their first response to me saying that I want to help create a psychology that is multicultural and anti-racist. And when I notice the fucked-upness of privilege lurking, I speak up about it, I point it out, I teach Racism 101, and frequently I drive people to change the subject or leave altogether. I'm also seeing more on my own, instead of waiting for a member of the group being discriminated against to point out the problems. I've noticed this awareness spreading out from racial awareness to awareness of how disabled people are discriminated against, or the mentally ill, or lesbigaytrans individuals. An increased sensitivity in one area has made me a better person overall in terms of my own ethics, even while those ethics remain essentially unchanged.

Someone recently (if anyone remembers whom, I would love the name, my sieve-like brain is unhelpful Two people who touched on this are Ilyka in this comment thread at Creek Running North about being an ally and Donna at The Silence of Our Friends) brought up the problem that by portraying becoming an ally as something difficult or painful, it gives privileged people (by any of the measures, not just racially) an excuse to not be allies and to justify it. I think that it can be used that way, and will be used by people who want to have their ethical cake and eat it to - i.e. who want to say they are anti-racist without internalizing any of the awareness of racism or changing their world-orientation and actions in accord with their ethics. But I would argue that those kinds of people would find excuses one way or another to avoid walking the walk that they talk.

The pain of becoming aware of how unjust and wrong the world is, how skewed and unnatural, how powerful people have twisted everything good for their own ends, is a true and honest pain, I think. The ability to ignore reality is a gift that is given to very few people, and those few people can do an enormous amount of damage in their blindness, but there is pleasure to be found in ignorance and giving up that pleasure, however unearned and world-damaging, is painful. I personally think the warning that it will be painful may help the honest ones of us, the ignorant and privileged, to keep going even at 3 AM when all the knowledge of the world we ignored for decades is beating down our bedroom doors.

I'm only a few steps outside, though; my ability to be wrong is legion.


* I am aware this term is somewhat problematic depending on the individuals who I would place under this umbrella term, but I find the phrase "non-white" even more problematic. If anyone has a better turn of phrase, I'd love to learn about it.

** The rest of my link list came later, in some cases much later; this is mostly chronological, so some of my best links, like brownfemipower (whose blog has been removed due to it not serving the community in the manner she wished it to) came much later.

*** For those who haven't gotten psychological phrasing bone deep like I have, self-soothing is the process of diminishing one's anxiety through tasks which bring one pleasure or comfort. In my case, this was often reading a particular section of abook, or watching a movie which was deeply meaningful.

Racism - It happens today and it SUCKS

Sylvia has a wonderful blog post on this. The down low - a white blogger makes a very minority-conscious post, which is massively out of character. People notice because hey - out of character - and notice that said white blogger attend a conference where these issues were presented by a wonderful woman who covers immigrant issues regularly, who has subsequently taken down her blog - which is a loss for the internet as a whole. An excellent roundup of the issues is at Smackdog Chronicles (which I had lost the link for - thank goodness for tracebacks!).

What I want to underline is this - not only is this sort of nuanced handling out of character, it also doesn't jibe with said white blogger's subsequent behavior - which is to go around making the issue all about her AND still not linking to the woman who has been covering these issues for years.

This is not feminist. This is treating another woman as if she is not a person.

This is racist.

It's also fucked in the head. And really, really, really pathetic.

Two Strangers in a Lobby

He sat hunched over a coffee cup in the corner of the theater lobby, still wearing a puffy, army green coat. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and his clothing was worn, and he stood out against the backlight of the well dressed patrons at the theater not due to the color of his skin, which was dark and warm, but due to the curve of his shoulders which spoke of trying to be invisible.

I was fairly certain he was homeless, or at the very least a shelter resident. I was fairly certain he had some sort of mental disorganization. I was fairly certain that he was proud and very cold and feared security sending him from the heat of the lobby into the freezing weather outside. The patrons, myself included, moved around him in a silent, careful pantomime, cautious of the incongruity of he and his battered styrofoam coffee cup.

He looked startled when I spoke to him, asking if I could sit at his table, but assented quickly. I studied the bits of program I had picked up – not really interested but adrift without a book in my purse. His voice was low and had a quaver in it; memories of clients from years ago washed over me – that same hesitancy; that same fear that I would somehow render them nonexistent, and again I felt clumsy in my unspoken and unwanted power.

He introduced himself. I returned the favor, offering my hand.

"I don’t shake hands, I never shake hands," he told me. I got a sense from him of a mingled fear to offend and fear to be pressed to acquiesce to a common practice he found deeply disturbing, and lowered my hand. "It tells too much, hand to hand," he added, trying to explain it to me.

We spoke a little about intimacy, about touch, and I told him about one of the origins of hand shakes in Rome, when it was a way of showing you weren’t holding a weapon and thus weren't a threat. Our interaction skimmed over the depths within him – within me – a brief and cordial meeting of strangers in a theater lobby. As the crowd of people grew thicker, he grew more anxious, and finally he excused himself.

"It was nice meeting you," I said to him, not holding out my hand.

He flashed a smile, hesitancy and anxiety writ large within it, bowed his head slightly, and moved off through the crowd and out again into the cold.

The Media, and Whites in General, haven't moved beyond 1981

Fire Fly has a post up about a speech given by Bernice Johnson (linked by Black Amazon, from which the final two links came, too). The stuff about the elections is paraphrases from NPR's discussion of it yesterday and this morning.

"Now if we are the same women from the same people in this barred room, we never notice it. That stuff stays wherever it is. It does not show up until somebody walks into the room who happens to be a woman but really is also somebody else." - Bernice Johnson

This happens everywhere and goes unremarked on. In the recent presidential race, the question of whether Obama was "black enough" has been openly debated in the (white, male, straight, Christian) media since mid-2007 at least, and yet people are saying THIS WEEK that Clinton's comments about Martin Luther King, Jr. suddenly "brought race" into it.

Bullshit.

Race has been in the presidential race since the first one, when not only couldn't a black person run but black people couldn't vote. Race has been there with multiple races, since the Native Americans were killed off or pushed into Reservations (which, I will note, frequently don't give them actual control of the land) and since Asians were objectified and killed off in the name of "progress" and railroads and since Mexicans were attacked for their land and since Latin@s in general were told they were good enough to pick food for the (white) Americans but not good enough to get the protection of the government or even be treated like human beings. Gender's been there too. Overt gender, in the form of the exclusion of women and the use of race to turn some women into "good" guiding angels and others into "bad" whores and even just good old "ball and chain" language, and covert gender, in the form of using terms for females as insults against males and targetting anyone, male or female, who dares to be "too much" like the other.

It's all there, in the room, elephants stomping on people's feet while they pretend it's their shoes pinching. It doesn't get brought it by those who are different from the people in the room. It's there waiting, an unspoken rule about who is allowed and who is not.

And yes, this happens in minority populations too, but minority populations aren't dominating the media and the government, so anyone who wants to derail this into "white people have it bad too" and "sometimes straight people suffer", fuck off.

P.S. "And there are people who prioritize the cutting line of the struggle. And they say the cutting line is this issue, and more than anything we must move on this issue and that’s automatically saying that whatever’s bothering you will be put down if you bring it up. You have to watch these folks. Watch these groups that can only deal with one thing at a time." - Also Bernice Johnson. Yeah, I'm looking at you, too.

P.P.S. Anyone know if there's a link floating aorund to her giving the speech? I'll hunt YouTube tonight, but I'd love to hear it. The cadences of speeches like this are often a second speech in and of themselves.

Behind the eight ball - running to catch up

I'm on these late, but I feel the need to at least link to those who are not so behind as me.

If you haven't heard about it yet, there was a huge travesty of justice in Jena, Louisiana. Beginning with a group of black students asking the principle if they could sit under the "white" tree, and culminating in a black student being charged with attempted murder for a fight, when previous white students who had instigated fights walked off with probation. One of those students, Mychal Bell, is still being held in jail after nine months - despite his trial being declared a mistrial - because he was denied bail.

Wikipedia has a run down of the events.

There is a virtual march on Jena in progress along with more information.

Black Amazon writes movingly about some of the ramifications of this incident, among many others non-whites deal with every day. If you haven't already been acquainted with this fantastic writer, I highly recommend you check out her blog. Her poetic style and raw emotion catch me short every time.

In the wake of the attention Jena is (finally) getting, an earlier travesty of justice was brought up by persons I prefer to leave unnamed who objected to the attention the Jena 6, comprised of black males, was getting when another situation, comprised of seven black females, was not getting any.

Brown Femi Power responds with an incredibly detailed and humbling list of posts about the New Jersey 7, who acted in self defense and were charged - and in many cases convicted - with assault for it.

Racism is alive and well. Sexism is alive and well. Both of them are destroying lives with every breath taken. It's not a southerner thing. It's not a black thing, or an Asian thing, or a Native American thing. It's an all of us thing. The only way we can truly live up to the (as of yet unrealized) standards of the USA is if everyone demands equal justice under the law for all people, regardless of culture, skin color, gender, romantic orientation, gender identity, physical capability, or immigration status.

from Feministe

I was greatly enjoying a bit of back and forth with La Lubu at Feministe in this thread, but I can't publish my latest comment, so here it is. Please feel free to continue it, comment, etc... Please do NOT feel free to bring up that tired, old, ad hominem nonsense about different types of feminist that plagued the original thread; I honestly don't care.

La Lubu @ 546:

It was heady—the idea that I too, could be beautiful—just by going with (instead of against) my natural hair. And all it took was a couple minutes with a comb. … Even the beauty culture can be a site of resistance.

I think this is important – and it’s part of why a multitude of women with a multitude of appearances doing a multitude of things and having both positive and negative characteristics – including racial appearance and culture, and body-ability levels like blind and wheel-chair bound characters.

560: What is feminist beauty? Where are the lines drawn? Who draws those lines? That’s a conversation we need to be having,

Good questions!

I’m an aesthetic, which means I value beauty over just about anything else, morally speaking, so I’ve some serious time invested in defining and understanding beauty as I see it. I think one major facet to feminist beauty as personal expression is that it be coming from an authentic place and that the entire process of being beautiful is enjoyable in of itself, not just as a means to an end. The “live in” aspects of the body needs to be central.

I think the lines are fuzzy around the edges and should be. Personal standards vary incredibly widely; for instance, I adore funky, high contrast looks, even if I can’t wear them (and I can’t – le sigh) but others don’t. The fact that others don’t doesn’t mean that funky, high contrast looks should suddenly be deemed not-$foo.

I think the lines are drawn where the individual meets the society, and change with individuals and the strength of their inner conviction. I can personally find something attractive in the appearance of any person I meet if I look, and while droll and snot completely gross me out, I can admire people who inadvertently do both (babies, for example) with a clean cloth in hand. ;) I'm particularly ofnd of sub-culture conforming appearances, though, like very punky Punks or very gothy Goths.

To tie this back into women and their appearance, there was a recent thread here (I think?) where hair was discussed, and Pam (of Pam's House Blend) 's experiences with her hair and how she found finally a reasonably easy, attractive style for her hair by listening to it, after years of trying to have it conform to an external standard. There is something in taking what one has and building off of it instead of detracting from it that I think is incredibly beautiful, both in appearance and action.

Art and Action

I've been listening to Linkin Park's new cd incessantly since I got it. Yes, I'm a huge Linkin Park fan; yes, you can point and laugh if you REALLY must.

They have several songs about recent events, from a particularly poignant one about Hurricane Katrina (all you've ever wanted / was someone to truly look up to you / and six feet underwater / i do) to several which seem to talk about responsibility, war, and people who send other people to die (i had hope / i believed / but i'm beginning to think that i've been decieved / you will pay for what you've done).

My favorite is still the radio played one, which is unusual for me, with a close second angry-depression song (i bleed it out / digging deeper just to throw it away). I like all of the songs, though, which is fairly standard for me and Linkin Park. The different lyricists speak to me, and their songs often become quite meaningful to me as time passes (while i've cleaned this slate / with the hands / of uncertainty).

I know nothing about the band members personally outside of their music. I tend to not approach musicians out of that context (this is true for me and most artists); art is a crystallization of a single moment and point of view that can't be matched by any individual human (nor should it). So I don't know if these songs are met by any private work, either to help survivors of the Katrina disaster or in protest of the military altercation (Congress never declared war, my friends; only they can) in Iraq that is meeting ever greater protest or in continued work to support the people in Afganistan who we have left in dire straights because we suck (we meaning the USA, which includes me because I am a member of the USA).

So in this contexts of ignorance - is art a political/social action?

Is a song enough?

In the context of Belle's recent post about creaitng new myths, is music a method?

Are words, reminders, notes sufficient?

If not, what then?